The present invention relates to a transmitter/receiver used in an ultrasonic wave diagnostic system, and more particularly to a signal transmitter/receiver for driving a pulse of a transducer and receiving a signal from the transducer.
A transmitter/receiver used in prior art ultrasonic wave tomogram devices basically comprises an oscillator having a capacitor and a high speed switch. This circuit presents problems in constructing it into an integrated circuit. Namely, a capacitor and an inductor for forming a resonance circuit are necessary but it is difficult to form those elements in the IC. A transducer as well as a resistor and an inductor, through which a charge stored in the capacitor is discharged, and circuit components to protect the receiver circuit are parallelly connected to the high speed switch as loads. As a result, an output transistor of the high speed switch must be of large size, and a pre-driver for driving the output transistor must also be of large size. These are disadvantageous to the IC implementation.